8 CEOs just scored $60B this year

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and Amazon.com, speaks at a press conference to announce the new BE-4 rocket engine during a press conference with Tory Bruno, CEO of United Launch Alliance, at the National Press Club September 17, 2014 in Washington, DC. United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin announced today that they have entered into an agreement to jointly fund development of the BE-4 rocket engine.(Photo: Getty Images)

Stop complaining about how lousy the stock market was this year. It was great — to the tune of $60 billion — for titans in the right industries.

Eight CEOs of companies in the Russell 1000 index, including Jeff Bezos of online retailer Amazon.com (AMZN), Mark Zuckerberg of social media giant Facebook (FB) and Larry Page of online advertising firm Alphabet (GOOGL), generated a massive $60 billion score this year from their stock holdings, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from S&P Capital IQ. Each of these CEOs made $500 million or much more — individually — from their holdings this year.

It's been a ho-hum year for most investors — as the Standard & Poor's 500 index has inched up just 1%. Even famed investor Warren Buffett of has suffered a mighty multi-billion dollar loss on his holdings on Berkshire Hathaway.

But that boring exterior of the market has masked what's been a banner year for the ages for captains of companies in the right industries. Three of the companies with the best performance are in the technology sector and another three are sellers of consumer discretionary items.

The biggest winner — by far — was Bezos. The CEO of Amazon.com, a retailer using technology to upend the entire industry, scored a massive $32 billion haul this year. That's right — just one CEO claimed more than half of the total score hauled in by these eight top-winning CEOs. But that's what happens when you have a CEO, who owns 18% of a company that's now worth $325 billion after a 124% rise of the stock this year.

Another huge winner is a CEO who is almost half's Bezos' age: Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Zuckerberg, 31, scored $12.5 billion in wealth this year thanks to the stock's 38% increase. Zuckerberg, who owns 15% of Facebook, continues to be the single-most largest owner of Facebook stock.

Alphabet, the company formerly known as Google, had an even better year than Facebook in terms of stock-price performance with a 50% rise. The year's stock-price rise translated into a nice $11.7 billion gain for CEO Page. Don't feel too bad for Page, though, as he trailed Zuckerberg's take stock-market take. Keep in mind Alphabet co-founder Sergey Brin, while not a CEO, also owns more than 42 million shares of the company's stock. That means Brin, president of Alphabet, himself scored $11.1 billion. That brings the year-to-date stock gains of the two "Google guys" to nearly $23 billion.

For most investors — 2015 was about as ho-hum as it can get. But it was a heck of a year for CEOs who founded some of the nation's most dominant companies.